An overwhelming majority of80% supports the launching of rockets from the Gaza Strip at Israelif the siege and blockade are not ended. Support for launching rocketsdrops in the Gaza Strip to 72%.This means that (if the poll weighted the populations of the two sectors properly) that the percentage of West Bankers who support rocket attacks against Israeli civilians is about 84%.

A majority of 57% believe that launching rockets from populated areas in the Gaza Strip is justified and 39% say it is unjustified. Among Gazans, belief that it is justified to launch rockets from populated areas drops to 48%while increasing in the West Bank to 62%.

Support for terror and armed conflict is still very high, but trending downwards, as disenchantment with Hamas grows. A large majority of 81% prefers "Hamas' way of resisting occupation." Support for Hamas’ way stood at 88% one month ago.

63% favor the transfer of Hamas’ armed approach to the West Bank and 34% oppose that. One month ago, support for this transfer stood at 72%. (I don't have details on the breakdown of populations for these questions.)

Other interesting findings:

The percentage of Gazans who say they seek immigration to other countries stands at 44%; in the West Bank, the percentage stands at 22%.

Only 23% say there is press freedom in the West Bank and an identical percentage say there is press freedom in the Gaza Strip.

Only 29% of the Palestinian public say people in the West Bank can criticize the authority in the West Bank without fear. By contrast, a larger percentage of 35% say people in the Gaza Strip can criticize the authorities in Gaza without fear.

The Western perception that Mahmoud Abbas' PA is more tolerant and liberal than Hamas is simply not reflected in these poll results.

Moreover, the relative intransigence of West Bank Palestinians compared to Gazans shows that the war didn't radicalize the Gazans as much as it radicalized the people who were not directly affected.

The radio interview is in English and these absurd lies can be heard at the 30 second mark here. He also says Israel "demolished" 50,000 homes (according to anti-Israel site Electronic Intifada, 15,670 homes were damaged, not demolished,) and that 500,000 Gazans are homeless (that is the maximum number displaced during the war but only about 50,000 remain in shelters as of a few weeks ago.)

Escalating the Palestinian leadership’s rhetorical assault on Israel, the chief Palestinian Authority negotiator, Saeb Erekat, on Monday claimed that 96 percent of Gazans killed in the summer’s Israel-Hamas conflict were civilians, reiterated PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s charge of Israeli “genocide,” and accused Israel of seeking to impose apartheid on the Palestinians.

In an Army Radio interview conducted in English, Erekat also claimed that Israel killed 12,000 people and injured another 12,000 in Gaza, though it was possible that he misspoke and intended to say 2,000 fatalities — the widely accepted figure.

Responding to Erekat’s interview, Israel’s Communication Minister Gilad Erdan said the Palestinian leadership was operating “an industry of lies” aimed at fundamentally delegitimizing Israel, and that there was “no one to talk to” about peace on the Palestinian side.

Erekat spoke three days after Abbas leveled the genocide allegation against Israel in his speech to the UN General Assembly in New York. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to address the General Assembly later Monday, having vowed to “refute the lies” disseminated by Abbas against Israel.

Erekat, in the radio interview, defined genocide as “a direct attempt to eliminate, horrify, relocate, destroy a way of life” and claimed “Israel committed the killing of 12,000 and wounding 12,000 Palestinians; 96 percent of them are civilians.”

UN figures put the death toll in Gaza of the 50-day Israel-Hamas conflict at some 2,100, almost three-quarters of them civilians. Israel disputes these findings, and says about 1,000 of the dead were Hamas and other gunmen. It blames Hamas for all civilian casualties, since the Islamist terror group emplaced its war machine amid the civilian populace. Seventy-two Israelis — six of them civilians — were killed in the conflict, during which Hamas and other Gaza terror groups fired some 4,600 rockets and other projectiles at Israel.

“I know Israelis are provoked for the fact that someone is using the term genocide,” Erekat said, but that, he claimed, was “the reality in Gaza today.” He also said the PA had “condemned atrocities and genocidal attempts by IS (Islamic State) and others,” and had “never condoned the firing of missiles to Israeli civilians.”

In the wake of Abbas’s speech, Erekat said, the Palestinians would be presenting a resolution to the UN Security Council demanding a Palestinian state “to live side-by-side in peace and security with the state of Israel” based on the pre-67 lines. Israel, he said, would thus be “getting 78 percent” of mandatory Palestine; “I’m getting 22%.”

The resolution would also call on the parties to find solutions to all core issues of dispute, including the fate of Palestinian refugees. “We will still need a just and agreed solution to the refugees,” he said, “just and agreed with you.”

However, Israel has a government “that does not believe in a two-state solution,” he charged. “You have a government that believes in one state, two systems — the translation of this is apartheid. We will not accept a new apartheid regime by Israel.”

Responding to the interview, Likud minister Erdan, a member of Israel’s key eight-member security cabinet, said that the attitude of the PA leadership underlined that “in the coming years, there’s nobody to talk to.”

Erdan added: “We have to understand that we have a stubborn enemy… The right and left in Israel have to unite against this Palestinian plot to delegitimize the state of Israel.”

He dismissed Erekat’s statistics as part of the Palestinian “industry of lies,” and said he did not believe the PA’s purported readiness for a state on the pre-67 lines was anything but “tactical” — implying that the PA was ultimately seeking the elimination of Israel.

Rather than directly fostering terrorism, Erdan charged, Abbas was engaging in “political terrorism” against Israel.

Challenged by the radio interviewer over the government’s opposition to territorial withdrawal, Erdan said “Israelis have seen that any territory we left has been seized by terrorists. That’s what happened in Lebanon; that’s what happened in Gaza.” If it hadn’t been for the presence of the IDF, terrorists would have taken over the West Bank as well, toppling Abbas, he said.

He said Abbas’s security cooperation with Israel in the West Bank was a case of “self-interest,” because Abbas knew “terror groups in Judea and Samaria would otherwise bring him down too.”

In his address to the UN,Abbas said2014 was meant to be a year of international solidarity with the Palestinians, but blamed Israel for choosing to make it “a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people,” referring to Israel’s Operation Protective Edge.

US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Friday said Abbas’s speech “included offensive characterizations” that the US rejects, and Netanyahu called it “inciting,” “slanders and lies.”

Underlining the intensification of a Palestinian legal campaign against Israel, Erekat also said Sunday that the Palestinians were “planning now to join 522 international agreements, conventions, protocols,” including those “paving the way to the International Criminal Court.”

Security Council petition calls for Israeli withdrawal by November 2016, ‘a just resolution’ to the refugee problem, and an end to all military and settlement activity

The Palestinians have asked the UN Security Council to set a deadline of November 2016 for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

A draft resolution circulated to council members and obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press also called for “a just resolution” of the status of Jerusalem as the capital of two states, and of the Palestinian refugee problem.

It follows Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s announcement to the UN General Assembly on Friday that he would ask the council to set a deadline for an Israeli withdrawal.

The draft also demands an end to all Israeli military operations and settlement activities, the opening of all border crossings in the Gaza Strip, and deployment of “an international presence” throughout the Palestinian territories to protect Palestinian civilians.

Abbas said Wednesday that the PA would reevaluate its security coordination with Israel in the West Bank if its statehood bid to the UN Security Council was rejected, and added that the Palestinians would file for membership to the ICC if the resolution failed to pass, according to Arabic media.

Speaking to journalists in Ramallah, Abbas said the Palestinians were meeting with representatives of the Security Council states to persuade them to accept the resolution once proposed. He added that once a timetable for Israeli withdrawal was set, he would agree to return to the peace talks with Israel.

“As soon as we get that, we are willing to return to the negotiating table,” he said, according to the Haaretz daily.

The unilateral move, widely expected to be shot down in a veto, has been lobbied against by Israel and the United States, which say the conflict needs to be resolved through a negotiated settlement.

Israel’s Channel 2 quoted the chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat saying that the US has already told him it will veto Abbas’s statehood resolution.

Nonetheless, the Palestinians are pushing to try to win the support of 9 of the 15 UN Security Council members in order to force a veto.

The TV report also quoted a new series of offensive statements made against Israel by leading PA figures.

“We are the lords of the land for 3,000 years, Netanyahu can return to his Brooklyn roots,” Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN ambassador, said Wednesday in connection with the statehood bid.

The PA president on Wednesday reiterated his stance against armed conflict with Israel, stating that “not even one bullet” would be fired under his watch.

The PA has repeatedly threatened to apply for membership in the international court, and lodge war crime charges against Israel. However, Abbas has yet to submit an application, according to ICC officials. Membership in the ICC would also place Hamas under international scrutiny for firing rockets on Israeli civilians.

Abbas’s remarks follow a strongly worded address he made at the UN, in which he accused Israel of “genocide” against the Palestinians.

In response, Netanyahu on Tuesday decried Hamas’s use of human shields and firing rockets on Israeli civilians and held Abbas responsible.

“And I say to President Abbas, these are the war crimes committed by your Hamas partners in the national unity government which you head and you are responsible for. And these are the real war crimes you should have investigated, or spoken out against from this podium last week,” Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly.

He also indicated that the peace talks should be coordinated with the Arab world.

Netanyahu said “to achieve that peace, we must look not only to Jerusalem and Ramallah, but also to Cairo, to Amman, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and elsewhere. I believe peace can be realized with the active involvement of Arab countries, those that are willing to provide political, material and other indispensable support.”

For almost 200 years, it has been regarded as a well-respected medical journal.

But according to senior British medical figures, the Lancet is being hijacked to campaign indefatigably against Israel, and used as a platform by alleged conspiracy theorists.

In August, it published a controversial “open letter for the people of Gaza” that condemned Israel in the strongest possible terms, but strikingly made no mention of Hamas’ atrocities.

The five principal authors of the letter made it clear that they had “no competing interests”. However, all of them have campaigned vociferously for the Palestinian cause over many years.

In addition, a cache of emails openly available in Google groups show that two of the authors, Dr Paola Manduca and Dr Swee Ang,have sympathies with the views of David Duke, a white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard.

Dr Swee Ang, an orthopaedic surgeon, and Dr Manduca, a professor of genetics at the University of Genoa in Italy – who are both members of pro-Palestine NGOs – sent round-robin emails to their contacts promoting a video entitled“CNN Goldman Sachs & the Zio Matrix”.

The video features an extended anti-Semitic rant by Duke, in which he claims that “the Zionist Matrix of Power controls Media, Politics and Banking” and that “some of the Jewish elite practices racism and tribalism to advance their supremacist agenda”.

Dr Ang wrote: “This is a shocking video please watch. This is not about Palestine – it is about all of us!”

In another email, Dr Manduca forwarded a messagealleging that the Boston marathon bombings were in fact carried out by Jews. “Let us hope that someone in the FBI us smart enough to look more carefully at the clues in Boston and find the real culprits behind these bombings instead of buying the Zionist spin”, it said.

Elsewhere, she shared an article comparing the Jewish state to a “strangler fig”, which grows around other trees and takes their sunlight, often resulting in the death of the original trees.

David Duke has been delighted by the apparent support of these respected doctors.“The latest group of people to join the ranks of those who have broken the chains of Zionist censorship have been a brave group of medical professionals,” he wrote on his blog.

In response to questions by the Daily Telegraph, Dr Manduca issued a statement in which shedenied being anti-Semitic. “[But] I legitimately use my right of freedom of opinion,” she said, “and do not agree or value the politics of the government of Israel, nor of many others, including Jews in and out of Israel.”

For her part, Dr Ang said: “I didn’t know who David Duke was, or that he was connected to the Ku Klux Klan.I am concerned that if there is any truth in the video, that Jews control the media, politics and banking, what on earth is going on? I was worried.”

She said that she was made aware of the video by a friend, Dr Kamal Alubaid, who appears to have been active on 9/11 "truth" websites. In one post, he referred to the Jewish State as "Racist Apparthide (sic) Israel".

Moreover,Dr Mads Gilbert, a third author of the letter, gave an interview with the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet in 2001 in which he said that the 9/11 atrocities were as a result of Western foreign policy, and that he supported terror attacks in that “context”.

Israeli campaigners brought this information to the attention of the Lancet in a letter sent on 1 September. However,the journal has refused to issue a response and has not removed the open letter from its website – through which it collected 20,000 signatures in support of the letter.

“It'sutterly irrelevant. It's a smear campaign,” the editor of the Lancet, Dr Richard Horton, told the Daily Telegraph. “I don’t honestly see what all this has to do with the Gaza letter. I have no plans to retract the letter, and I would not retract the letter even if it was found to be substantiated.”

Dr Horton, who has in the past spoken at rallies organised by Stop The War Coalition, denied that the journal's reputation would be damaged by giving a platform to people who appear to hold such views, and said thatthe Lancet is not intending to investigate the allegations....NGO Monitor, an Israeli watchdog, points out that over the past 15 years, the journal has formed a number of partnerships with Palestinian groups, including the Lancet-Palestinian Health Alliance, Medical Aid for Palestinians and the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme.

By contrast,there have been no comparable collaborations with Israeli groups.

Professor Katz and a number of other senior medical figures have written to the medical ombudsman to register their complaints.

On 29 August, Professor Sir Mark Pepys, director of the Wolfson Drug Discovery Unit at UCL, wrote: “The failure of the Menduca et al authors to disclose their extraordinary conflicts of interest… are the most serious, unprofessional and unethical errors.

“The transparent effort to conceal this vicious and substantially mendacious partisan political diatribe as an innocent humanitarian appeal has no place in any serious publication, let alone a professional medical journal, and would disgrace even the lowest of the gutter press.”

He accuses Dr Horton, the Lancet editor, personally: “Horton’s behaviour in this case is consistent with his longstanding and wholly inappropriate use of The Lancet as a vehicle for his own extreme political views,” he says. “It has greatly detracted from the former high standing of the journal.”

In response, Dr Horton said: “How can you separate politics and health?The two go hand-in-hand.”

Somehow, however, Dr. Horton can separate clear antisemitism and politics. He cannot even be bothered to issue a perfunctory denunciation of Jew-hatred.

"I thought about the situation and if it is not too late, please would you kindly include my regret for circulating Dr Duke's lecture and my apology for the offence I have caused to many of my friends, both Jewish and non-Jewish in doing this. I have done this out of shock at the contents and my ignorance of the undercurrents, and will be more discerning in future about these kind of allegations."

Are we expected to believe that an educated doctor has no idea that blaming the Jews for having a secret conspiracy to control the world is offensive?

She is alsoon the recordfor justifying suicide bombings. But, hey, supporting cold-blooded murder isn't enough to convince The Lancet to question her opinions on politics and health.

How Palestinian universities like Bir Zeit are intellectually straitjacketing their students.

I’m not an Israeli, so even though I’ve been reporting on Birzeit University near Ramallah for more than 15 years, I didn’t know until my colleague Amira Hass was asked to leave the campus last week that the university operates a ban on Israelis.

Well, not all Israelis, as Amira explains. Just “Jewish Israelis.”

The ban probably makes sense to most Palestinians, but it’s a disgrace and should be repealed.

The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which organized the conference from which Amira was ejected, denounced her expulsion as “discrimination” and expressed its solidarity with her. In a statement, the university said it had “no objection to the presence of the reporter Hass” but felt justified “as a national institution to distinguish between friends of the Palestinian people and its enemies.”

On Tuesday, the university issued a tougher statement, regretting the “lamentable incident” excluding Amira and clarifying that it welcomes “supporters of the Palestinian struggle and opponents of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, regardless of nationality, religion, ethnicity, or creed. Hence, Hass, who has consistently condemned the Israeli occupation, evinced support for Palestinian rights, and helped expose the discriminatory policies of occupation and its flagrant violations of these rights, is always welcome on our campus.”

So not all Jewish Israelis, then. Not the good ones.

The ban is not just immoral and racist, it’s symptomatic of the crushing failure of the Palestinian higher education system to fulfill its role as the engine powering the Palestinian future because of its stifling obsession with the Palestinian past.

I've reported from Bir Zeit dozens of times for The Chronicle of Higher Education and other media. I've reported the random arrests and administrative detention of their students and lecturers, often in the middle on the night, by the IDF. I’ve reported how many of those students and lecturers have been held for months, even years, without a fair trial, sometimes without even being told the crimes of which they are suspected.

In 2009, for example, there were 83 Birzeit students incarcerated in Israeli jails, of whom 39 were convicted of various terror-related charges, 32 were awaiting trial, nine were in “administrative detention” and three were undergoing interrogation following their arrest. Birzeit accounts for more than half of all the 1,000 Palestinian students arrested by Israel since the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, including at least three of its student council heads who were arrested and held for months on end.

Clearly, some of these students were also engaged in dangerous terrorist activity, but the majority appears to have been innocent of any real crime.

Nor is Birzeit alone in feeling the crushing weight of Israel’s occupation interfering daily with its studies and students. Just about every Palestinian university in the West Bank has stories of nighttime IDF raids, campus teargas attacks and random arrests and intimidation.

So I am well aware of the pressures that distinguish university life at Birzeit from Berkeley or Brooklyn College.

But much of the trouble there has little to do with Israel or the occupation. I have also reported the political intimidation and violence doled out by some Birzeit students to their political opponents. I met the Islamist student who led the stone-throwing rioters who injured the visiting French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and chased him off campus in February 2000. The British Consul-General Sir Vincent Feane had to beat a similar retreat in 2013.

In 2007, university classes were suspended and students evacuated from the campus after Ahmad Jarrar, a student supporter of the ruling Fatah party, was assaulted in his dormitory room, apparently by four men from the Marxist PFLP. Jarrar was treated at a hospital for severe injuries suffered as he was apparently being tortured. The assailants used charcoal to burn Jarrar’s face and hammered nails into his feet. Fatah gunmen arrived soon after, threatening to kill PFLP supporters.

Earlier this year, I broke the story of a Palestinian student trip to Auschwitz organized by a professor at Al-Quds University who has since resigned over the fallout it caused. Two Birzeit students were due to go on that trip. They pulled out at the last moment after heavy pressure from the university.

This obsession with politics, although understandable, does a considerable disservice to the students who rely on Birzeit and the other Palestinian universities to help them create a better future for themselves – and for the Palestinian people.

Birzeit, ironically, was actually founded by the Israelis. The dictatorial Jordanian regime would never sanction an independent university in the West Bank. It soon became the intellectual powerhouse of Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation.

But it has failed to mature into a new, post-revolutionary role and become the engine of emerging Palestinian statehood.

One small example illustrates the problem. Despite enormous efforts by international companies, Arab entrepreneurs and a small number of Israeli and Jewish investors, the Palestinians are failing to produce a viable high-tech sector. While thousands of Israeli twenty-somethings are developing world-class technology with little more than a Wi-Fi connection and a laptop, their Palestinian counterparts have precious little to show. Apologists argue that it’s because of Israel’s refusal to allow a Palestinian 3G network, but that’s not true. Sure, the lack of 3G is another disgrace, which should be fixed, but it affects domestic consumers, not developers. Tech development uses Wi-Fi, not 3G, and is aimed at the international market, not the local one.

The main reason for the under-development of Palestinian high-tech is the poor education on offer from universities like Birzeit. One of the few successful tech start-ups in Ramallah was founded by an East Jerusalem Palestinian who studied at a Hebrew-speaking Israeli school and then at an Israeli university. His business is expanding fast, but he cannot find enough skilled Palestinian graduates to hire.

It’s a complaint I hear repeatedly when I’m reporting on Palestinian graduates. High grades in exams are achieved by parroting the lecturers’ ideas, not by challenging them. The universities are simply not teaching their students the independent critical thinking skills needed in today’s world. Their educational system is mired in the past.

If Birzeit and the other Palestinian universities spent less effort intellectually straitjacketing their students, and more time teaching them how to think critically and independently, the Palestinian future would look a lot brighter.